My Favorite Software: Part 1a

In a previous post, I promised to give the lowdown on the auxiliary tools that I use to maintain and enjoy my digital music collection.  Several people have been asking about it, so it is apparently time to keep that promise.  So here it is in one large, boring list:  the Gclectic digital music toolbox.

• Ripping: All of the big name jukeboxes will let you rip albums, but I chose CDex because it allowed me to plug in my choice of encoders, and because it supports the open freedb database rather than the proprietary Gracenote database.
• Encoding: Regardless of your bitrate preferences, LAME is the encoder to go with.  This is an excellent example of the power of open source software, and is the standard used by a number of commercial music vendors.  I am a bit unusual in my bitrate preferences, however.  I have found that nobody in my household can hear the difference between a carefully encoded 64kbps track and a bit-hungry 192kbps version.  Since I carry 6000 tunes on a heavily loaded laptop, that factor of three really pays off for me.  The key here is the "carefully encoded" part.  I use average-bit-rate encoding with min/average/max settings of 32/64/320, and I make sure to specify –alt-preset-abr.  If you want a higher bitrate, you can simply change the average value and leave everything else the same.
• Tagging: I like my tracks to be consistently and correctly tagged, and I wholeheartedly support the MusicBrainz project for maintaining a high-quality collaborative album-info database.  MusicBrainz has a good working relationship with the aforementioned freedb and the abaftmentioned AudioScrobbler, so that all of these tools can work together nicely.
• Listening: There are many programs that’ll play your music for you, and probably at least two of them shipped with your computer.  I prefer to grab my own copy of WinAmp however.  It’s lightweight, has an active community developing plugins, and doesn’t feel like it’s trying to drag you into somebody’s music shop.  (I sometimes wonder about its unhealthy obsession with llamas, but that’s neither here nor there.)
• Tracking: I track my listening patterns and preferences through AudioScrobbler (which has now been merged with its companion broadcasting site "last.fm").  A simple winamp plugin pings their server whenever I play a song, and then they provide me with exhaustive information based on those pings.  (There are plugins for most major media players — winamp just happens to be the most popular.)  In addition to summarizing my interests, it can also point me to other bands that I might like, other users who share my tastes, and aggregate statistics on bands and tracks.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the only piece of "spyware" I have on my system, but since I voluntarily installed it for the explicit purpose of watching me, I’m not about to complain about it.
• Syncing to portable devices: I have yet to find any tool that meets my needs for transferring tracks to my portable MP3 player.  The problem lies in the fact that many players on the market play through all of the tracks in a directory in alphabetical order by filename.  Every piece of jukebox software I’ve dealt with copies the files from a playlist into a directory without changing their filenames.  The result is that the carefully contrived order of the playlist is lost.  I deal with this problem by running 68 lines of homebrew Java code which copies files referenced in playlists and renames them so that they will play in the right order.  I believe that every commercial jukebox program should be able to do as well as my 68 line program, but I haven’t seen it yet.

I hadn’t realized it until I finished compiling the list, but not a single one of these tools requires that you pay to use it.  I’ve got nothing against buying commercial software, and have voluntarily contributed money to support several of these tools, but the array of high-quality free tools is quite impressive.

There you have it.  Along with MusicMagic Mixer, these programs have given me a clean, well-organized music library and many happy hours of listening.  Hopefully, they’ll do the same for you.